Let's work a little on the contract before we meet for dinner

Before we meet for a working dinner next Wednesday, maybe we could do a little advance work to save time when we get together. That way, we can avoid not finishing up during what will probably be our only meeting before school starts again (Hate the sound of that! So soon...).

So I'm posting a slightly revised Contract here, reflecting a change Randy suggested ("win" changed to "earn") and a typo fixed.

Any other ideas?

Also, I'd like to address a couple of Susan's questions. First is the concern of this performance grading system taking up a lot of time. My feeling is two-fold: One, if our Aeries gradebook (or any gradebook you like) is set up right, it won't take much time, and, two, we have to spend time grading these kids anyway, why not get it out of the way as we go and say, "Wow, half the battle's over!"

I'd be glad to show how I set up my Aeries online, in advance, and how I use it in real time in the classroom.

And that might answer Susan's other concern, that Aeries might be complicated to operate or couldn't be open in the classroom. We can lock our desktops any time we want and unlock quickly, so that has a work-around.

Now, I think I softened up my original system quite a bit, so I hope no one thinks it's too hard. My hope here is that we hold our students to a high standard (and ourselves too). We also get to model a strong program, and that's good for our reputation at VHS. What's more, we might be able to survive if the school disciplinary plan runs into some bumps, which I know we're all a little worried about.

A last point: I know some of us don't like to enforce all of the VHS school rules, and I know that it's compounded by the fact that teachers all across the campus ignore them. That's makes all our lives tougher.

We can lobby to have the rules changed. I fear that we're not helping our kids by showing them that we know how to break rules, how to selectively ignore the ones we don't like. And we're not helping our colleagues who enforce them when others don't. It makes the tough teachers look mean, uncool. And that, I feel, is really uncool.

That's an area where we really could use some discussion.

Final tips on using the blog: What I'm typing right hear is a "post." We can all "comment" on a post. This allows us to introduce a topic or set of connected topics. The comments section is where we can discuss back and forth the topics mentioned in a post. For example, if members have thoughts about what I've just said, we (including me) can swap ideas through a back-and-forth in the comments.

If anyone had a unique perspective that they feel warrants a new discussion, they can create and publish a new post. We have to be logged into Blogger.com to do that, but it's pretty easy.

Now, I'm the administrator, but the only extra power I have is to delete posts or comments, plus I suppose I can delete members. But all of us can post or comment. All my suggestions are about process. And, again, as a member of our team, I welcome suggestions about how we can best use the blog. As administrator I'm only taking the extra role (not really power) of being organizer.

I hope to hear reactions to the new contract and any other ideas about it or anything I've said in this post.